'I Want to Set the Record Straight'

TWO YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH, PAUL REUBENS (AKA PEE-WEE HERMAN) GETS THE FINAL WORD

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Contemplating the End

“Death is just so final,” Reubens said while filming Pee-wee as Himself. “To be able to get your message in at the last minute, or at some point, is incredible.”

For more than 40 hours in 2023, Paul Reubens sat down for a series of one-on-one interviews, candidly recounting the highs and lows of his decades-spanning career. It wasn’t always easy—there were creative disagreements and real concerns that his story, particularly his arrest and misdemeanor charge for possessing materials depicting children in a sexual manner, might not be told the right way. Still, the actor, best known for his iconic alter ego Pee-wee Herman, chose to trust the process and committed to one final interview. Just one week before it was set to take place, Reubens died. “I had no reason to believe that Paul was contemplating his mortality,” says director Matt Wolf, who conducted the interviews unaware that Reubens had privately been battling lung cancer for six years. “I found out that Paul died on Instagram along with everybody else.”

Shortly after Reubens’s death, his assistant contacted Wolf and shared a recording the late star had made the day before he died on July 30, 2023, at age 70—his final words to the world. That recording, combined with the deeply personal interviews and archival footage, forms the emotional core of Pee-wee as Himself, a new two-part docuseries premiering May 23 on HBO. “I want to set the record straight,” Reubens, his voice weak and unsteady, said on the tape, which is played at the end of the film. “More than anything, the reason I wanted to make a documentary was to let people see who I really am and how painful and difficult it was to be labeled something that I wasn’t...a pedophile. I wanted somehow for people to understand that my whole career, everything I did and wrote, was based in love.”